The best plan in life is to not have a plan. If you like planning though, make sure it doesn’t involve a family of impersonators, an unknown underground basement, a morse code knowing freakish refugee, and/or knives casually laying around in your house.
Ocean Vuong. I am incapable of embellishing him with any dumb metaphors I can clumsily conjure up, so I’ll just quote him. I mean, just check the beginning of this one poem he titled ‘Deto(nation)’:
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
To even write father
is to carve a portion of the day
out of a bomb-bright page.
There’s enough light to drown in
but never enough to enter the bones
& stay.
Or this extract from ‘Threshold’:
I didn’t know the cost
of entering a song — was to lose
your way back.
So I entered. So I lost.
I lost it all with my eyes
wide open.
Or the entire piece ‘Telemachus’. I think about this one line I read in the beginning of ‘On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous’:
What is the meaning of freedom, if not the distance between hunter and prey?
Isn’t freedom a mental construct though? Wouldn’t you feel free-er after successfully dying, if there is a way to mess that up too, that is? Doesn’t man need some artificial constraints to hold himself tied up to the Earth of his feet and mind? Wouldn’t distance only encourage a much stronger yet futile anxiety?
I love metaphors but such strong imagery is definitely not an arrow in my imaginative arsenal.
Should I become a disgrace to both sides by reading the book after already having watched the movie? C’mon man, I didn’t know ‘Requiem for a Dream’ was based on a novel. It’s just that after ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ I want to read more Hubert Selby Jr. Also, requiem for a dream was a damn good story on film, how much does it deviate on paper? For an example, instead of showing people intoxicating themselves with drugs, they chose to show a very fast sequence of disconnected images: a soaking cotton ball, a buoyant hallucination, an icky white mixture, lips smacking together, coloured dots flying about. It looked exquisite, and furtive.
Maybe I’ll just start ‘The Room’ instead.
I kinda really wanna try my hand out at smut writing cause then I can complete all levels of being a Wattpad superstar. But its just too much work to first learn all the vocabulary and then also the complete mEtHodOloGy of how everything happens because I’m still definitely not clear on what happens during S-E-X, you know what I mean. Mom said, she’ll tell me when its the right time, but I think she just doesn’t want me to know (in case I’ll be better at kid-having than she is, because I’m just perfect at whatever I do.) Also, I have a gut feeling it has something to do with bananas because once these friends told me to eat them and I said I don’t like black bananas and this black dude got really offended, so hmm. Going to have to start liking bananas now if I’m serious about getting good at this smut thingy, AMIRITE?
Someone called Robert Sapolsky the “Bob Ross of Neuroendocrinology” and, complete agreement.
My son,
even tomorrow
you will have today. Don’t you know?
